#pandoras vault

[rue-the-dayy]

[ladyddanger]

thinking about the events of the dsmp hundreds of years later being just a bunch of stories.

In a village nestled between tall pines children play Manberg Vs Pogtopia, the names of nations and reasons for war long forgotten as they hit each other with sticks and tackle their friends to warm summer grass.

When their mothers tuck them in that night they tell them stories of a snowy wasteland, so ancient it still holds the scars of long wars forgotten. They tell them of the wasteland’s inhabitant, the greatest warrior this world has ever seen. His name is lost to history but warriors still pray to him on the eve of battle and tie ravens feathers in their hair in his honor.

If the children misbehaved that day their mothers tell them a different story, one of a masked man who steals bad children and drowns them in the sea.

There’s a crater a few miles east of the village in the middle of the marshlands up by a glittering ocean. The crater is so deep that you can throw rocks off the edge and never hear them hit the bottom. Legend says that once upon a time the goddess of death had a son who walked this earth and when he died in her rage and grief she tore into the city that once stood there with her bare hands and ripped it from the earth leaving nothing but a crater behind.

On long sunny evenings in the inns that dot the coastline bards tell stories of a cursed city of gold and glass buried in the heart of a desert where it snows. They whisper the city is full of riches but nobody who looks for it ever comes back.

On stormy nights the Bards tell a different story, a story of a town that sits over a slumbering god. Strange things happen there. Red vines sport up over night. If you listen closely, the people say you can hear them talk. Everyone there has red eyes and cold cold hands.

If you start at dawn and ride in the opposite direction of the carter you can reach the vault before nightfall. The locals claim it used to hold a faceless god guarded by a king but time has weathered the vault’s defenses and the towns children dare each other inside its walls, running though the tight passages.

An old fairytale says if you follow a small barely visible path from the doors of a vault beyond you’ll reach a forest full of trees so overgrown they block the sun. The fairytale says if you walk to the heart of the forrest there’s a prince sleeping there, nestled in the flowers and weeds. The fairytale says his true love and his knights are long dead. The fairytale says he dreams the whole world in existence. The fairytale says a lot of things but nobody really believes it.

[splatattackz]

you wouldn’t survive an hour in the asylum where they raised me

[gorlicberd]

idk how this app works but LOOK C!RIVALSDUO ANGST WAHOO

[dazewashere]

Prison arc in a nutshell

[swordfright]

A while back someone on my dash said something along the lines of “what sam wants from dream is a demonstration of the agency sam wants to take from him” and i’ve been thinking about it ceaselessly for what feels like months on end. Sam doesn’t want to win dream’s obedience completely, because if dream continues to rebel, if dream continues to be insubordinate in small manageable ways, sam can take this behavior as proof that dream hasn’t learned discipline yet, that rules and consequences must continue to be enforced - that sam is, in a sense, needed. Sam is a builder and dream is the ultimate engineering project: challenging (psychologically taxing to guard), important (to the stability of the server), rewarding (on those sporadic occasions when dream obeys him without question), and ceaseless (because the ideal prisoner always needs a warden to keep them in line.) The existence of the prisoner necessitates the existence of the warden. sam’s job is keeping dream locked up and as long as dream needs to be locked up, sam needs to be the warden. This is also part of why sam is incapable of seeing dream as a person rather than a monster - because if he admits that dream is capable of growth and change, he must then admit that one day, dream might grow into the sort of person that doesn’t need to be locked up anymore. Which would render the warden obsolete. That cannot be allowed to happen because sam needs to feel needed. And we’ve come full-circle.

[eepyusername]

post prison c!dream design (he is so silly i love him)

[ghostly-groves]

me and my friends are always locked in debate about this one, so:

rb for a larger sample size!

[spicypineapplejuice]

you better eat this shit up tumbler

[restnowyourhardshipisover]

Actually. Full post on this topic.

Pandoras vault is a work of art, not just narratively but mechanically.

It’s a fucking tragedy that so few people positioned to appreciate how complex and amazing pandoras vault is got to see it.

Like. Tubbo was salivating for a non canon tour for a reason. Techno’s awe and compliments when he entered the prison speaks volumes.

Alarms to detect block breaking? Layers of explosion protected obsidian? Daily changed out keycards? From a system that was completely inaccessible and sealed? Ender pearl chambers for fast recall? A network of nether portals to prevent someone from linking a portal to inside of the prision from the nether? The visitation system?

That thing is a marvel. Not only is it constructed in survival it’s constructed to be truly survival functional on a server where people will brute force and just break in.

And as fans and server mates found possible ways in, Sam patched it, was there to defend it, multiple times, in ways that suited the narrative.

Then he found weaknesses to allow for a extraordinarily epic, fully in camera, in survival break in. Then patched them. Then did it again.

And to hear Sam talk about it there’s more to the mechanisms than we ever saw.

[cgogs]

PLEASE COOK ‼️‼️🗣🔥🔥🤞🤞 BRO IM BEGGING 🙏

[strawbearbean]

[begin id] a drawing of c!awesamdude as the warden (minecraft mob)! he has a human-ish face with a crown and gas mask, and the horns/body of the mob. the souls in his chest are in the shape of dream, technoblade, ranboo, ghostbur, tommy, and connor. they're intended to be a little creepy looking! [end id]

the warden as a warden! this was @druid-for-hire 's idea, please check them out!! they are not only an insanely skilled illustrator but also so creative and fun :D

i know it doesn't look like much, but my GOSH that was a lot of bones to paint!! i'm really happy how it turned out though :> hope you like it, too!

have an awesome day beloveds, i hope you smile lots!!! see you soon!

[likesdoodling]

Found a list of drawing ideas from about a year ago, and figured I’d illustrate this one!

:)

[bleue-flora]

You know what I just realized. Sam spends the prison arc trying to punish, declaw, and not be manipulated by Dream and by the end in many ways he has become him. He uses Ranboo’s attachment to his kid to arrest Ranboo and uses presumably Dream’s or Techno’s attachment to Ranboo to try and make Dream stay. So not only does Quackity become like Dream, abandoned by his friends while using attachments and manipulation tactics to gain control so they can be a happy family, but Sam the lawful warden does too. In more ways than one, they became the very person they hated and labeled as an irredeemable evil. And while Dream in the end did have his moment of, for the lack of a better word, redemption, Sam and Quackity spat in the face of their opportunity. The true irony.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

[inbox-to-the-void]

Dream: NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS TO THE-

Despite not being rivals duo, this is still for @simplepotatofarmer

[IMAGE ID: The first of two drawings depicting dsmp Dream. Dream is posed like the fire elmo meme, with white text that reads "NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS TO THE-" as a reference to the "NOTHING BAD EVER HAPPENS TO THE KENNEDYS!" meme from Clone High. END ID]

[IMAGE ID: The second of two drawings depicting dsmp Dream. Dream is sitting on the floor with his head in his hands, mask cracked and hair longer than the first image. He's wearing an orange prison uniform and black boots, scars visible on his arms. END ID]

[swordfright]

Heyyyy @kayfabeoutcold i'm your gifter for @dreblrsecretsanta this year! The prompt i went with was "christmas in the prison box," hope you like it!!!